UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time • Hacker News Board

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#41

Post by mannykannot » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:01 AM UTC

calinet6 wrote: post #13

> To preface the article, I primarily work on, and prefer, back-end code. I've been involved in both web and software development for over 4 years now Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Main principle you wan…

I have used a quite a lot of online retail sites, and for me, the thing that most distinguishes the good from the bad is the quality of their search features, in giving me the tools to focus on relevant results.

The most visible feature of many of the sites I visit are the attempts to get me to do something other than what I went to the site for.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#42

Post by sgdesign » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:02 AM UTC

This reminds me of the old cliché about advertising. 95% of advertising doesn't work, but the problem is knowing which 95%…

Similarly, even granting the author's point that most UI redesigns are misguided, the fact remains that we do want the products we use to somehow improve over time…

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#43

Post by paultopia » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:04 AM UTC

This is especially super-double-extra true if your name is Microsoft. Because everything that company has redesigned has become harder to use every time they touch it. Remember what happened after MS acquired Skype and Skype became unusable? Or how people in the business world routinely have to pay for expensive training courses to learn where Microsoft put all the functionality in the latest twisting of Office? Good heavens, please, stop. (Dishonorable mention to Google re: Gmail.)

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#44

Post by Pxtl » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:06 AM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #36

debaserab2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that really qualifies as a redesign on the scale the article describes. It sounds like the author is describing a total UI overhaul, not simply modifying one element on one page of the design.

The way I read the article, it said that none of this stuff was worth doing -- just get it barely usable and then stop making changes. But it clearly is worth doing based on A/B testing and real, measured results. When millions of people are using your site, even micro-optimizations are worth doing.

They specifically mention repositioning the logout button to make it more accessible. That sounds like a micro-optimization.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#45

Post by sonnyblarney » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

pfranz wrote: post #34

sonnyblarney wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing." Of course, in the first 10 seconds or few minutes, but I suspect strongly this effect fades over time. Most UI redesigns are bad because they focus on the wrong things and throw out a lot of good things, or change for the sake of change.

At a previous job I would see the process of films getting made. After a year of keeping the same joke they'd swap it out with a less funny joke. It's not because the new joke is better, the old joke got tired to them and the new joke was fresh. I see the same thing happen all over the place--branding and UI are very common victims.

That's a very interesting insight.

Music editing has the same issues as well. Even in the short term - over the course of a day your ears can get tired of a specific set of sounds and you don't hear with 'fresh ears'.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#46

Post by hackerbrother » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:12 AM UTC

paultopia wrote: post #43

This is especially super-double-extra true if your name is Microsoft. Because everything that company has redesigned has become harder to use every time they touch it. Remember what happened after MS acquired Skype and Skype became unusable? Or how people in the business world routinely have to pay for expensive training courses to learn where Microsoft put all the functionality in the latest twisting of Office? Good…

All I will say is I like their current reboot of office365 Outlook webmail

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#47

Post by ng12 » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:18 AM UTC

Most redesigns have a goal. More ads, more cross-selling, better engagement are common metrics. Redesigns are very rarely done just to make a site "look better", they're done with some other goal in mind.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#48

Post by geuszb » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:21 AM UTC

I was a bit of that mindset until I worked close to a team that worked on such a redesign for a consumer product with hundreds of millions of users.

The really amazing thing to me was that even though the redesign didn't add any new functionality, and there weren't really any glaring usability problems with the previous one, users would still blog about some cool "new feature of the redesign" that had in fact been in product for years.

Basically, changing the skin of the product caused users to poke about and try new things.

Now the flip side of this is the design upset their routines, and there was certainly an element of that, but it was managed ok by giving people the option to switch back to the old design for a while.

On the whole, the redesign caused increased feature awareness and usage, which definitely wouldn't have been my guess going in.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#49

Post by james_s_tayler » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

inertiatic wrote: post #19

calinet6 wrote: post #13

> To preface the article, I primarily work on, and prefer, back-end code. I've been involved in both web and software development for over 4 years now Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Main principle you wan…

>People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Citation absolutely needed. In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work. If it happens in so many other cases, it does happen in UI/UX as well.

Yeah. It's a bit of column A and a bit of column B.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#50

Post by pdonis » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:29 AM UTC

calinet6 wrote: post #13

> To preface the article, I primarily work on, and prefer, back-end code. I've been involved in both web and software development for over 4 years now Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Main principle you wan…

> Visual design quality does have an impact.

A negative one, based on what you quote:

"This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can prevent issue discovery during usability testing."

Which seems to be saying that the uglier you make your UI, the better your chances of having actual usability issues surface.